Bard envisions the liberal arts institution as the hub of a network, rather than a single, self-contained campus. Numerous institutes for special study are available on and off campus, connecting Bard students to the greater community.

The Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College embodies the fundamental belief that education and civil society are inextricably linked. In an age of information overload, it is more important than ever that citizens be educated and trained to think critically and be actively engaged with issues affecting public life.

Nilaja Sun

Open Rehearsal of Pike Street

Saturday, March 1, 2014

Fisher Center, LUMA TheaterFollowed by a discussion with the artists

Directed by Ron Russell

After sold-out performances at the Fisher Center with her tour-de-force No Child . . . Nilaja Sun returns to Bard to develop Pike Street, a new play about a Lower East Side family during the “storm of the century.” Her work-in-progress residency will culminate in this open rehearsal.For more information, call 845-758-7900, e-mail fishercenter@bard.edu, or visit http://fishercenter.bard.edu/calendar/event.php?eid=122591.

Polar Plunge 4 People & Planet (P4P2)

Saturday, March 1, 20142 pm

The Parliament of Reality

Join us on Saturday, March 1st at 2pm to support students, faculty, and staff from CEP and EUS as we plunge into icy waters of the Parliament of Reality. There will be music, costume contests, water entry contests, and community revelry. Any member of the Bard community who wishes to contribute $5 on the spot to CEP or EUS is welcome to leap into the freezing water with us! Funds raised will be used for scholarship and internship stipends.

The Visitor Talks : Alex Kitnick

Monday, March 3, 20143–5 pm

CCS Bard Seminar Room 1

For the last few years Kitnick has been interested in Marshall McLuhan’s writing on art and the ways it incorporates examples from contemporary art practice. McLuhan often turned to artworks when he was trying to give an idea of how new media and technologies affect the social body; he found new bodies in works of art. This talk will try to examine what the viability of such an approach might be today by looking back at a variety of recent projects.

Alex Kitnick is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Art History Program at Bard College. He also teaches at The Artist’s Institute, a project of Hunter College. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 2010. From 2011 to 2012 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He is the editor of Dan Graham (2011) and The Expendable Reader (2011). His writing has appeared in publications including Art Journal,Artforum, May, October, and Texte zur Kunst.

POSTPONED Amy Hempel Reading

Monday, March 3, 20144–5:30 pm

Olin AuditoriumThis event has been postponed to 2:30pm on Monday, March 10, in Weis Cinema.

The Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series presents a free public reading by acclaimed short-story writer Amy Hempel. Introduced by Bradford Morrow; followed by a Q&A. No tickets or reservations are required.For more information, call 845-758-7054, or e-mail mmorriss@bard.edu.

Africa Is a Country and Shifting Digital Landscapes in Media of Africa

A talk by Sean Jacobs, Assistant Professor of International Affairs, The New School

Monday, March 3, 20144:45 pm

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 AuditoriumSean Jacobs is a founding member of blog Africa Is a Country, which is a widely-used news source and which also offers commentary on political and social affairs related to the continent of Africa and its global representation. Jacobs, who was born in South Africa, is currently working on a book manuscript that explores the inter-relationship between mass media, globalization and democracy in South Africa. He has published numerous articles in Mail & Guardian (South Africa), The Nation (United States), and The Guardian (United Kingdom) on a range of topics, from contemporary South African politics to the recent death and legacy of Nelson Mandela.Sponsored by: Africana Studies Program; Difference and Media Project; Experimental Humanities Program; Hannah Arendt Center.

Talk by Michiel Bot: The Politics of Offense *MOVED*

Monday, March 3, 20146 pm

Olin, Room 202Giving and taking offense have taken center stage on the political scene since the end of the Cold War and especially since 9/11. Think, for instance, of the controversy following the publication of the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in 2005, and of the peculiar way in which various Western European right-wing populists combine indignation with deliberate “political incorrectness,” presenting their anti-immigrant or anti-Islam rhetoric as a liberation from “multicultural censorship.”

In this presentation, Bot argues that giving and taking offense play an important role not only in establishing, but also in negotiating and critiquing affective investments in shared norms, and that this is important for democratic politics. Thus, Bot argues against “intellectualist” conceptions of democratic politics that either consider offense a threat to discussion in a purely rational public sphere (along Habermasian lines), or that mandate that “what can be offended must be offended” in order to liberate all citizens from their by definition “irrational” affective investments (along Nietzschean lines).

Bot also argues against theories of tolerance or multiculturalism that are premised on the claim that giving offense should always be avoided in the name of respect for difference or “modus vivendi.” Instead, Bot proposes that giving offense is central to the intimately connected practices of democracy and critique, which always involve challenging established moral, political, and aesthetic hierarchies, or what Jacques Rancière calls established partitions/sharings of “the sensible.” Taking offense, on the other hand, can be a critical move against attempts to invalidate all expressions of indignation as illegitimate interferences of moral or religious feeling in a public sphere that ought to be kept strictly “rational,” amoral, and “secular.” Closely examining what it means to give and take offense and to be offended, Bot situates his argument in relation to recent instances of the “affective turn” in political theory, from Sara Ahmed’s Cultural Politics of Emotion to Lars Tønders’ Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics.For more information, call 845-758-7878, or e-mail bhollenb@bard.edu.

The Fall of Constantinople and Early Concepts of Human Rights

Nancy Bisaha, Vassar College

Monday, March 3, 20146 pm

Hegeman 204Prof. Bisaha wrote Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (UPenn Press), which examines the ways in which humanists created an intellectual discourse depicting the Ottoman Turks as a cultural and religious other. She recently published a translation of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini's De Europa in collaboration with Robert Brown. Bisaha is currently working on project exploring the early roots of human rights theory.

Master class/seminar: Richard Goode, piano

Debussy's Preludes

Wednesday, March 5, 20144:30 pm

László Z. Bitó '60 Conservatory BuildingPart of a new series combining elements of master class and seminar. Conservatory students play works related to the topic of the afternoon, with coaching and discussion by Richard Goode.

“The Crisis in Ukraine: The Start of a New Era of Confrontation?”

Wednesday, March 5, 20146 pm

Olin, Room 204

The current situation in Ukraine as been described by British Foreign Secretary William Hague as “The Greatest Crisis in Europe in the XXIst Century.” The panel on Wednesday will focus on the international challenges related to the current crisis and potential scenarios for the future.

A Broken Set of Dickens

A Faculty Seminar Presented by Bradford Morrow

Wednesday, March 5, 20147 pm

Olin, Room 102

“My lifelong obsession with books began not because I grew up in a family of book lovers or because I had access to an intellectually stimulating private library or my father was an English professor or my mother was a poet. No, it had to do with deprivation.”

These are the opening lines of Bradford Morrow’s lecture on the making of a bibliophile. Delivered as the keynote address at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar last year, “A Broken Set of Dickens” explores the myriad ways in which people interact with books. Morrow traces his personal journey, begun in boyhood, from furtively reading an off-limits copy of Bleak House taken from his mother’s mantelpiece set to handling a fifteenth-century edition of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiæ in college to becoming, in his twenties, a noted rare bookseller and then a bibliographer, restoration binder, editor, publisher, critic, poet, novelist, children’s book writer, essayist, and professor.

This talk also appears as a chapter of Professor Morrow’s collection in progress, Meditations on a Shadow, which includes his essay “My Willa Cather,” delivered as the keynote address at the 2009 Willa Cather International Symposium at the Chicago Public Library and the following year at Bard.

Please join us at 6:30pm for a reception prior to the event in the Olin Atrium.

Two Mode Matrix of Urban Structure

A lecture by James Gatewood, United States Military Academy

Thursday, March 6, 20144:40 pm

Hegeman 308

We present an urban network that takes into account how streets and neighborhoods interact and influence each other. This two-mode urban structure presents another approach to analyze urban environments. We use GIS to construct a network map of an American city and then apply network analysis to evaluate how the network structure influences such features as traffic flow, density and housing considerations. Also, given the rise of African cities, where some are being completely designed and developed in lieu of developing organically, the results of this project will make recommendations for effective metropolitan growth structures.

The Evolution of Irrationality: Insights from Primates.

The Andrew J. Bernstein '68 Memorial Lecture

Thursday, March 6, 20146:30 pm

This lecture will explore the evolutionary origins of some species' systematic errors. Specifically, the consideration whether humans share of our more irrational errors with close relatives, the non-human primates. This lecture will tackle the larger issue of whether some human irrationalities stem from evolutionarily-ancient cognitive strategies, ones that are shared broadly across the primate order.

Pre-Opera Talk

Friday, March 7, 201410:30 am – 12 pm

László Z. Bitó '60 Conservatory BuildingShawn Jaeger, composer of the new opera Payne Hollow gives a talk about his creative process and how this new opera came to life. Shawn writes:

"Payne Hollow is a love story, a ghost story, and a tribute to lives lived in harmony with the land. It celebrates two modern-day Thoreaus—Harlan and Anna Hubbard—who, from 1951–1986, lived in solitude and self-sufficiency, without electricity, in a small home they built on the bank of the Ohio River, at Payne Hollow. Their lives were filled with gardening, fishing, preserving, foraging, and scavenging, but also with reading, painting, writing, and playing music together. The opera’s libretto, by the distinguished Kentucky author, Wendell Berry, is an adaptation of Berry’s short verse play, “Sonata at Payne Hollow.” "

Much of Jaeger's composition is based on a piece that the Hubbard's played together: Johannes Brahms' Violin Sonata No.1 in G Major. Anna played piano, and Harlan played violin. Shawn will play musical examples from his opera that demonstrate his use of the Brahms material and talk generally about his compositional process, as well as his process of working with Mr. Berry. We are also so privileged to have Bard faculty Marka Gustavvson and John Halle give a special mini-concert of the Brahms' violin sonata in G major (Ms. Gustavvson on violin and Mr. Halle on piano). John and Marka will also talk about their working process as spouses and musical collaborators.

There will be time throughout for questions from the audience; we hope this will be a very interactive experience for anyone who is able to attend!

Degree Recital: Adrienn Kantor, flute

with Szilvia Mikó, piano

Saturday, March 8, 20148 pm

László Z. Bitó '60 Conservatory Building

Adrienn Kántor is a Senior at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, studying flute with Tara Helen O’Connor. Adrienn was the principal flutist of the New York String Orchestra Seminar in 2009 and 2010. As part of the program, she performed four times in Carnegie Hall, and was praised “for her graceful adornment in the slow movement of the Brahms Double Concerto and the rapid fluttering passage work in the finale” of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3. (Eugene Chan, examiner.com) In 2012, Adrienn participated in the Bard Conservatory Orchestra’s tour in Greater China, on which she played Larry Sitsky’s Sonata for Solo Flute in Shanghai’s Drama Theater. Also in 2012, she took part in the Colon Music Festival in Venezuela, where she performed and gave flute lessons. In the spring of 2013, she studied German literature at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. She was awarded the Bitó Scholarship, and was tied for second place in 2011 at the New York Flute Club’s annual competition. Adrienn is writing her senior project in German Studies on Heinrich Heine’s poetry.

Colors through the Darkness: Three Generations Paint and Write for Justice

Monday, March 10, 20141:30–3 pm

During the years of military rule in Argentina in the 1970s, Alicia Partnoy was a young student who, along with her husband and thousands of others like them, was “disappeared.” For five months, she was held in a clandestine prison by government forces for daring to argue for social equality and human rights. Her 18-month-old daughter Ruth was fortunate to have been found by her grandparents and raised by Raquel and her husband until Alicia’s release. Alicia was one of the few survivors of this kind of brutal detention, and after two and a half additional years in jail, she was expelled from the country and admitted as a refugee in the United States with her daughter. Her parents later followed, and together they rebuilt their lives in Washington DC.

Raquel, Alicia and Ruth have made use of literature, poetry and visual art to process their traumatic personal experiences, as well as to raise awareness about human rights abuses in Argentina and other places in the world. The paintings of visual artist Raquel Partnoy are a call to action on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves. Alicia Partnoy’s 1982 book The Little School was the first testimonial written in English, describing in detail an Argentine secret detention center. It is still widely read and taught today and it was presented as evidence in the recent trials against the genocide perpetrators. Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s book The Strange House Testifies (2009) is the first book to poetically document the Argentinian genocide from a child’s point of view.

Raquel Partnoy, Alicia Partnoy and Ruth Irupé Sanabria will share their art, writing, memories and commentary on the continuing struggles for justice in Argentina. They will discuss their conviction that active engagement and resistance through creative expression is worth the effort and the risk, providing the possibility of countering destructive violence with creative works that benefit society as a whole.Sponsored by: Center for Civic Engagement; Hannah Arendt Center; Human Rights Program; LAIS Program; Spanish Studies.

Amy Hempel Reading

Acclaimed American short-story master Amy Hempel reads from new work

Monday, March 10, 20142:30–4 pm

Campus Center, Weis Cinema"It's a given that someday a major world religion will arise from [Amy Hempel's] Collected Stories. ... Each time you read this book it shortens your time in Purgatory and speeds your eventual salvation." —Chuck Palahniuk

The Visitor Talks: Dave Beech - Art and Capitalism

Monday, March 10, 20143–5 pm

CCS Bard Seminar Room 1The talk will provide a critical survey of theories of art's relationship to capitalism (reification, culture industry, commodification, spectacle, incorporation, recuperation and real subsumption) as well as offer an alternative account based on art's "economic exceptionalism" resulting in art's "commodification without commodification".

Dave Beech is an artist in the collective Freee, based in London, and teaches Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art. He writes regularly for Art Monthly and recent books include Beauty for MIT/Whitechapel and the forthcoming title Art and Value for the Historical Materialism book series. He has exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial 2013 and the Liverpool Biennial 2010.

This talk is given as part of the lecture series The Visitor Talks : Pre-ambulation and Retrospection.Sponsored by: Center for Curatorial Studies.

Kuru Updated

Tuesday, March 11, 20144:45 pm

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 AuditoriumThe unraveling of the epidemic of kuru, a neurodegenerative disease, in a remote area of New Guinea, led to two Nobel Prizes in science and a classic ethnography, Kuru Sorcery, by anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum, who uncovered the role of endocannibalism in this disease's transmission. The revised and updated second edition of Kuru Sorcery provides an opportunity for a conversation about the place of anthropology in an interdisciplinary research project. Rayna Rapp will consider how kuru helped to define the emergence of medical anthropology in the context of multi-disciplinary research. Shirley Lindenbaum will reflect on how the kuru story has been elaborated in popular literature. Sponsored by: Anthropology Program; Biology Program.

Photography Program Lecture: Christian Patterson and Jason Fulford

Tuesday, March 11, 20146–7:30 pm

Campus Center, Weis CinemaThe Photography Program will be sponsoring a lecture by Christian Patterson and Jason Fulford on Tuesday, March 11 at 6pm in Weis Cinema. This lecture is free and open to the public.

CHRISTIAN PATTERSON was born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Photographs are the heart of his work, but documents, drawings, objects and paintings often accompany them. His work Redheaded Peckerwood was published in 2011 to critical acclaim, won the 2012 Recontres d’Arles Author Book Award and is now in its third printing. In 2013 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Patterson is self-taught but has lectured extensively about his work. He is represented by Rose Gallery in Santa Monica and Robert Morat in Hamburg and Berlin.

JASON FULFORD is a photographer, publisher, and designer. Fulford’s photographs have been featured in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Time, and on book jackets for Don Delillo, John Updike, Bertrand Russell, Jorge Luis Borges, Terry Eagleton, Ernest Hemingway and Richard Ford. He is the co-founder of J&L Books, and his other monographs include Sunbird (J&L, 2000), Crushed (J&L, 2003), and Raising Frogs for $$$ (J&L, 2006). His most recent collection, The Mushroom Collector, combines flea market postcards of mushrooms with his own photographs and text about the project. Fulford lives and works in Scranton, PA.

South African Dignity Jurisprudence: Why it Matters in South Africa and Beyond: A Talk by Drucilla Cornell

Tuesday, March 11, 20146 pm

Olin, Room 102The dignity jurisprudence of the constitutional court of South Africa is sweeping in its range and philosophical depth. In this talk, Cornell will cover the most significant as well as controversial aspects of this jurisprudence as well the issues it raises more generally about the way we think about law.

Drucilla Cornell is an American philosopher and feminist theorist, whose work has been influential in political and legal philosophy, ethics, deconstruction, critical theory, and feminism. Cornell is Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature and Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University the State University of New Jersey; Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Pretoria, South Africa; and a visiting professor at Birkbeck College and University of London.

Tuesday, March 11, 20146–7:30 pm

Olin, Room 202“BEST POWER TO THE PEOPLE MOVEMENT IN NYC” - VILLAGE VOICE

“IT IS REAL GRASS-ROOTS DEMOCRACY, AND IT IS BEING PRACTICED BY THE IMMIGRANTS WHO LIVE IN EAST HARLEM” - NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Movement for Justice in El Barrio was founded in 2004 by immigrants and low-income people of color of East Harlem to fight for dignity and against neoliberal displacement. A majority- women of color organization, Movement operates on a commitment to self-determination, autonomy, and participatory democracy.

Driven by multi-national corporations and profit-seeking landlords, and facilitated by city officials, gentrification has swept through New York City, causing the wholesale displacement of low-income people of color and immigrants from their communities. East Harlem is experiencing a wave of harassment, abuse, and intimidation as greedy landlords attempt to evict community members from their homes in order to raise rents and increase profits. With over 850 members, Movement has gone building-to-building to organize with their fellow neighbors to build a neighborhood-wide movement for dignity and justice—from below and to the left.

Wednesday, March 12, 20146 pm

Olin, Room 102Triple Canopy editors Molly Kleiman and Peter J. Russo will present the magazine’s new publishing platform and discuss the work of composing and contextualizing Web-based artistic, literary, and critical projects. The new platform aims to articulate and enrich the relationships between writing code and reading prose, between digital interfaces and printed pages, between social media and public space. Conceived collectively and developed over the better part of a year, the redesign also reflects Triple Canopy’s commitment to thoughtful interaction with artists and writers, and the magazine’s mission to create immersive reading and viewing experiences online.

Triple Canopy’s editors will give an overview of the magazine’s history, working methods, and the particulars of the redesign and then present a more detailed look at the way in which specific artistic and literary projects have been conceived, edited, and designed in collaboration with contributors. This presentation will be followed by an open discussion of artistic production, alternative publishing models, and digital technologies.Sponsored by: Art History Program; Experimental Humanities Program; Literature Program.

Chuck Stein: Reading from a New Translation of Homer

Wednesday, March 12, 20146:30–7:30 pm

Olin, Room 202Poet and Translator Chuck Stein will read from his new version of Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey," and discuss the art of translating Greek epic poetry.Sponsored by: Classical Studies Program.

Thursday, March 13, 201412 pm

Adinkras for Combinatorialists

A lecture by Yan Zhang, University of California, Berkeley

Thursday, March 13, 20144:40 pm

Hegeman 308

Adinkras are graphical tools created for the study of representations in supersymmetry. Besides having inherent interest for physicists, adinkras offer many easy-to-state and accessible open problems for mathematicians from different trades (by the end of the talk, I will have pretended to have known stuff about Clifford algebras, posets, coding theory, switching graphs, and algebraic topology...), but especially combinatoralists! I will include my original results, but mostly, I just want to share my enthusiasm for these pretty objects. No specialist knowledge required.

March Dance Concert

Friday, March 14, 20147:30 pm

Fisher Center, LUMA TheaterChoreographed and performed by Bard students, assisted by professional lighting and costume designers, this concert gives students a chance to explore new territory in dance making. For more information, call 845-758-7900, or e-mail fishercenter@bard.edu.

The Institute of Advanced Theology Lenten Lecture Series - "Christianity in Today's World"

Friday, March 14, 201412:30–1:30 pm

St. John the Evangelist Church, 1114 River Road, Barrytown, The Institute of Advanced Theology will be hosting the Spring 2014 Lenten Luncheon Lecture Series, "Christianity in Today''s World," led by Bruce Chilton.

The dates of the lectures are: Fridays, March 14, 21, 28, April 4, and April 11, 2014.

In five lectures, The Rev. Dr. Bruce Chilton will trace evolution from the Enlightenment until the period know as post-modern.

The lectures will be held at the Church of St. John the Evangelist, located at 1114 River Road, Barrytown, NY.

The presentation begins at 12:30 p.m. followed by a question and answer period. Lunch is at noon and will consist of soup, bread, dessert, and beverage at a cost of $6.00.

If you have any questions, please call 845-758-7279.Sponsored by: Institute of Advanced Theology.

An Opera Double Bill: Payne Hollow by Shawn Jaeger, libretto by Wendell Berry and The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten

Friday, March 14, 20147 pm

Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater

March 14 at 7 pmMarch 16 at 2 pmTickets: $15, $25, $35, and $100**The $100 ticket includes premium seating and an invitation to a special champagne reception with the artists on Sunday, March 16 ($75 tax deductible).

Conducted by James BagwellDirected by Nicholas Muni

Featuring the singers of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program and the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra.

Special early dining seatings for opera guests at Mercato Osteria in Red Hook starting at 5pmFor reservations, please call 845-758-5879

March Dance Concert

Saturday, March 15, 20147:30 pm

Fisher Center, LUMA TheaterChoreographed and performed by Bard students, assisted by professional lighting and costume designers, this concert gives students a chance to explore new territory in dance making. For more information, call 845-758-7900, or e-mail fishercenter@bard.edu.

Celebrate Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson During The Big Read

Saturday, March 15, 2014 – Friday, May 2, 2014

Local CommunitiesThe Big Read takes place in Germantown, Kingston, Red Hook, Rhinecliff, and Tivoli, and will focus on Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Activities will take place from March 15 to May 2, 2014.

Events are planned throughout the Hudson Valley at businesses, libraries, schools, and homes with community events, performances, talks, and book groups. Book clubs are encouraged to participate.

The Big Read, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) managed by Arts Midwest, is designed to revitalize the role of literature in American culture and to encourage citizens to read for pleasure and enlightenment. Bard College is one of 77 nonprofit organizations to receive a grant to host a Big Read project this academic year.

Edible Containers

Saturday, March 15, 201410 am – 2:30 pm

Olin, Room 202Growing wholesome, healthy food for friends and family can be simple, decorative, and take up very little space. Learn practical planting and cultivation techniques for growing vegetables, herbs, and some fruits in containers. Everything from how to select and place containers, the most suitable varieties of seeds and plants for containers, and the best irrigation and harvesting methods will be covered.Instructor: Anne Christian 143GAR168$76 non-members/$68 membersSponsored by: Landscape and Arboretum Program.

Master class/seminar: Charles Castleman, violin

Saturday, March 15, 20144–6 pm

László Z. Bitó '60 Conservatory BuildingPart of a new series combining elements of master class and seminar. Conservatory students play works related to the topic of the afternoon, with coaching and discussion by Charles Castleman.For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail concertoffice@bard.edu.

March Dance Concert

Sunday, March 16, 20142 pm

Fisher Center, LUMA TheaterChoreographed and performed by Bard students, assisted by professional lighting and costume designers, this concert gives students a chance to explore new territory in dance making. For more information, call 845-758-7900, or e-mail fishercenter@bard.edu.

March Dance Concert

Sunday, March 16, 20147:30 pm

Fisher Center, LUMA TheaterChoreographed and performed by Bard students, assisted by professional lighting and costume designers, this concert gives students a chance to explore new territory in dance making. For more information, call 845-758-7900, or e-mail fishercenter@bard.edu.

An Opera Double Bill: Payne Hollow by Shawn Jaeger, libretto by Wendell Berry and The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten

Sunday, March 16, 20142 pm

Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater

March 14 at 7 pmMarch 16 at 2 pmTickets: $15, $25, $35, and $100**The $100 ticket includes premium seating and an invitation to a special champagne reception with the artists on Sunday, March 16 ($75 tax deductible).

Conducted by James BagwellDirected by Nicholas Muni

Featuring the singers of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program and the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra.

Special early dining seatings for opera guests at Mercato Osteria in Red Hook starting at 5pmFor reservations, please call 845-758-5879

The Visitor Talks: Juliane Rebentisch

Remarks on the Politics of Curating

Monday, March 17, 20143–5 pm

CCS Bard Seminar Room 1Taking her book Aesthetics of Installation Art as a point of departure, Juliane Rebentisch will reflect on the politics of curating via addressing the relations of aesthetic autonomy, institutional critique, and the public today.

Monday, March 17, 20144:30 pm

RKC 100The first presentation overviews the Computer and Information Science (CIS) department at Fordham University and introduces the CIS graduate program in Computer Science.

In the second presentation, three pieces of ongoing research at the FRCV Lab will be overviewed: visual homing, multirobot exploration and formal analysis of robot behavior to generate performance guarantees.

Visual homing is a navigation approach first proposed as a model of inspect behavior. Because it requires only visual image comparisons, it is a simple and general approach. However, goal directed motion in the absence of distance information can be error prone. Nirmal & Lyons (2013) proposed a stereocamera based visual homing whose performance improves on that of regular visual homing.

In deploying a team of robots to explore an area for search and rescue or C-WMD missions, it is preferable for the team to spread out and cover the area as quickly as possible. It is difficult to design a simple, decentralized dispersion algorithm that works with a wide range building layouts. Liu and Lyons (2014) developed a simple yet general potential field approach based on the concept of generating a potential in empty space that reflects coverage.

It would be preferable to deploy autonomous teams rather than teleoperated robots to handle C-WMD missions given the potential for widespread and serious damage. However, autonomous robots can behave very unpredictably. Formal verification techniques, such as model-checking, could be applied to this problem, but the requirement parallel activities, time-constrained and probabilistic action, and real-number variables all cause extreme state-space size issues. Lyons and Arkin (2012) propose an approach to verification of behavior-based robot systems based on a process algebra model of recurrence a dynamic Bayesian network for probabilistic filtering. They show that this can be used for efficient verification of performance guarantees and validate the guarantees with extensive experimentation.Sponsored by: Computer Science Program.

"Moving from Deference to Insurrection: Compassion with Teeth"

Max Zahn, founder of "Buddha on Strike"

Monday, March 17, 20145 pm

Olin, Room 201In a recent op-ed, New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof declared, “There is an income gap in America, but just as important is a compassion gap.” He, like many on the left, invokes compassion as a precondition for moderate reform, let alone societal transformation. Is he right? If so, what might a truly more compassionate America look like? Activist and Buddha On Strike founder Max Zahn will explore how compassion functions in mainstream politics, and explain how a particularly Buddhist notion of compassion can move radical politics beyond demonizing elites and toward altering the structures that empower them. To demonstrate a case study in the efficacy and challenges of intentionally compassionate political action, he’ll draw upon his recent 42-day meditation protest outside Goldman Sachs headquarters.Sponsored by: Religion Program.

Remembering Fukushima

a documentary by Atsushi Funahashi

Monday, March 17, 20146–7:45 pm

RKC 103

Three years have passed since the devastating magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11, 2011, crippling the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Filmmaker Atsushi Funahashi follows the residents of Futaba, a town located three kilometers from the site of the explosion, who have been turned into “nuclear refugees” upon their forced relocation to a Tokyo suburb. Still today, many are unable to return to their contaminated homes and remain in temporary housing. As the film captures the town’s devastation – dead livestock left to rot, abandoned crops, destroyed homes and businesses, – Nuclear Nation questions the high cost of Japan’s nuclear power industry through the story of these displaced residents and their struggle to adapt to their new environment.

A Tale of Two Syrias Screening

and a post-film discussion with the filmmakers

Monday, March 17, 20146 pm

Olin, Room 102Please join us for a screening of the documentary A Tale of Two Syrias and a post-film discussion with the filmmakers,

Yasmin Fedda and Dan Gorman.

A short description of the film:

Salem is an Iraqi fashion designer in Damascus. Botrus lives a remote existence in a hillside monastery. This consistently insightful and unexpected documentary offers a unique perspective on what the dream of freedom means to two very different people in the face of a brutal regime, creating a vital snapshot of life in the year before Syria's uprising.

Meet the Filmmakers! The Guernica Variations and City of Signs

On Art, War, and the Avatars of Filmmaking

Tuesday, March 18, 20145:30–7:30 pm

Campus Center, Weis Cinema

Screening followed by Q&A with the filmmakers.

Both films are in Spanish with English subtitles.

The Guernica Variations (Guillermo Peydró, 2012, 26 min): Picasso’s Guernica is the image of a disproportionate attack on unarmed civilians to demoralize and subjugate a whole population, it encapsulates a turning point that ushered in today’s use of terror against civilians.

This film received the 2013 Best Documentary Award from Uruguay’s International Short Film Festival, among other awards, and has been widely screened at museums, including the Reina Sofia National Museum.

City of Signs(Samuel Alarcón, 2009, 62 min): When César Alarcón travels to Pompeii to collect ‘psychophonies’ - electronic voice phenomena - from Vesuvius’s great eruption, he finds that none contain sounds from the year 79 AD. Eloquent voices from the recent past will nonetheless lead him to the exploration of Roberto Rossellini’s mysterious life and film production.

This film received the 2011 Román Gubern Essay-Film Award, among other awards.

Ray Brassier, "Wandering Abstraction" Seminar

Thursday, March 20, 201410 am – 1 pm

CCS Bard - Seminar roomRay Brassier will be visiting CCS Bard to discuss his recent essay "Wandering Abstraction," published in Mute on February 13, 2014. This essay develops his own rationalist position in relation to recent accelerationist arguments and was originally presented at the Berlin Accelerationism conference.

All are welcome to attend. The seminar will presume that those in attendance have read the essay (link below.) Ray will review it for about 15 minutes, followed by an extended discussion/Q&A.

http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wandering-abstraction#

Ray Brassier teaches philosophy at the American University of Beirut. Author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (2007), his recent publications include: "That Which is Not: Philosophy as Entwinement of Truth and Negativity" in Stasis (2013), "Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism: Sellars’ Critical Ontology" in Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and its Implications (2013), "The Reality of Abstraction" in Laruelle and Non-Philosophy (2012), and "Lived Experience and the Myth of the Given," in Filozofski Vestnik (2011).

The Institute of Advanced Theology Lenten Lecture Series - "Christianity in Today's World"

Friday, March 21, 201412:30–1:30 pm

St. John the Evangelist Church, 1114 River Road, Barrytown, The Institute of Advanced Theology will be hosting the Spring 2014 Lenten Luncheon Lecture Series, "Christianity in Today''s World," led by Bruce Chilton.

The dates of the lectures are: Fridays, March 14, 21, 28, April 4, and April 11, 2014.

In five lectures, The Rev. Dr. Bruce Chilton will trace evolution from the Enlightenment until the period know as post-modern.

The lectures will be held at the Church of St. John the Evangelist, located at 1114 River Road, Barrytown, NY.

The presentation begins at 12:30 p.m. followed by a question and answer period. Lunch is at noon and will consist of soup, bread, dessert, and beverage at a cost of $6.00.

If you have any questions, please call 845-758-7279.Sponsored by: Institute of Advanced Theology.

The Institute of Advanced Theology Lenten Lecture Series - "Christianity in Today's World"

Friday, March 28, 201412:30–1:30 pm

St. John the Evangelist Church, 1114 River Road, Barrytown, The Institute of Advanced Theology will be hosting the Spring 2014 Lenten Luncheon Lecture Series, "Christianity in Today''s World," led by Bruce Chilton.

The dates of the lectures are: Fridays, March 14, 21, 28, April 4, and April 11, 2014.

In five lectures, The Rev. Dr. Bruce Chilton will trace evolution from the Enlightenment until the period know as post-modern.

The lectures will be held at the Church of St. John the Evangelist, located at 1114 River Road, Barrytown, NY.

The presentation begins at 12:30 p.m. followed by a question and answer period. Lunch is at noon and will consist of soup, bread, dessert, and beverage at a cost of $6.00.

If you have any questions, please call 845-758-7279.Sponsored by: Institute of Advanced Theology.

D. T. Max Reading

Monday, March 31, 20142:30–4 pm

Campus Center, Weis CinemaThe Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series presents a reading by the author of the New York Times bestselling biography Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. Introduced by Bradford Morrow; followed by a Q&A. Free and open to the public; no tickets required.For more information, call 845-758-7054, or e-mail conjunctions@bard.edu.

The Visitor Talks : Molly Nesbit

Begin Again: the Pragmatism in the History of Art

Monday, March 31, 20143–5 pm

CCS Bard Seminar Room 1A pragmatism helped lay out the ground plan for art and art history in the 1930s as art schools, museums and university departments found their modern form in the United States. Now, almost a century later, faced with demands for re-structuring the programs for art, we do well to look again at those beginnings. Call them a toolkit for the twenty-first century too.

Molly Nesbit is Chair and Professor in the Department of Art at Vassar College as well as a contributing editor of Artforum. Her books include Atget’s Seven Albums (Yale University Press, 1992) and Their Common Sense (Black Dog, 2000). The Pragmatism in the History of Art, the first volume in a collection of her essays, has just been published by Periscope Press. Since 2002, together with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija, she has tri-curated Utopia Station, an ongoing book, exhibition, seminar, website and street project.

This talk is given as part of the lecture series The Visitor Talks : Pre-ambulation and Retrospection.Sponsored by: Center for Curatorial Studies.